MJP List of Modern Magazines of literary or artistic significance operating during the period 1890-1922

This list is a work in progress, and we invite all those interested to help us improve it. It is intended to provide basic information about all the English-language magazines of literary and artistic interest operating during the period from 1890 to 1922. We stop at 1922 for copyright reasons, with the intellectual justification that we are interested in the rise of modernism, which may be considered complete by that date.

The list may be downloaded or used in any way scholars and students of modernism wish to use it. But we have a specific project in mind for those who are in a position to assist us. The MJP exists mainly to provide digital editions of magazines from this period, with full editorial support. To that end, we have indicated on this list the journals we consider most suitable for digitization (in red type), and others that we consider interesting but would put second in order of priority (in blue).

In the course of our work we have discovered what we call the hole in the archive — by which we mean the gap left when our libraries bound up these periodicals and discarded the advertising pages that were in them — a virtually universal practice. Our catalogues often indicate that they have extensive runs of periodicals, but what they actually have are bound copies without the advertising. This means that, for those of us who see advertising as a significant part of modernism, these holdings are incomplete, no matter what the catalogues may say.

The MJP includes advertising in its digital editions, which means that we require original issues in order to perform this work and make these texts available to you. Therefore, we ask you to take this list and do three things with it.

1. Tell us whether you agree with our priorities or would suggest changes.
2. Look in your own libraries for original issues of the magazines on this list that have priority and let us know if you find any.
3. Send us additions, corrections, and anything else that will help us improve this list and make it more useful to scholars and students.

We work with cooperating libraries in making our editions, and we will be happy to work with yours, if they have original issues of a journal of interest. Remember, please, that we cannot consider journals published after 1922, though we can consider a partial run up to that year.

Note: Mass magazines begin at the end of the nineteenth century. Little magazines appear in reaction to them. Earlier magazines are usually classified on our list as "inter" for intermediate. Some highly specialized magazines (like The Dickensian) have not been included. Sources consulted in compiling the list include Mott's A History of American Magazines (all five volumes), Peterson's Magazines in the Twentieth Century, Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich's The Little Magazine, Sullivan's British Literary Magazines: 1837-1914, and 1914-1984, and Chielens's American Literary Magazines: the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century, and The Literary Journal in America: 1900-1950, as well as Mike Ashley's The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines 1880-1950. This list is far from perfection, but it is a start, and with your help we can make it better.

We have now (December, 2006) received considerable help from Brad Evans at Rutgers, who has added a large number of very small magazines (bibelots) to this list. We hope others will follow Brad's example and send us information about journals published during our time period (1890-1922) that we can add to this list.

Please send suggestions and information to:

Robert_Scholes@brown.edu